Not about space tourism. About anti-aging therapies. From Reuters:

Olshansky and his colleagues have called on the U.S. government to inject $3 billion a year into the field, arguing the benefits of achieving an average seven-year delay in the process of biological aging would far exceed the gains from eliminating cancer.

Ethically, the extension of life is controversial, with some philosophers arguing it goes against fundamental human nature.

But John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, said any society that applauded the saving of life had a duty to embrace regenerative medicine.

“Life saving is just death postponing with a positive spin,” he said. “If it is right and good to postpone death for a short time, it is hard to see now it would be less right and less good to postpone it for a long while.”

Yes, this is the logical dilemma that the Kassians and other deathists find themselves in. Who are they to decide how long other people should live?

I was talking about this with someone last summer in DC, and he asked an interesting question. There’s a respectable argument to be made that, while not every individual requires religion to be good, society itself does, because not everyone will be moral without a belief in a divine lawgiver and retribution in the afterlife. Similarly, he asked me, though no one wants to die, isn’t it good for society that we do?

My trite response, a la Groucho, is “what has posterity ever done for me?”

Unquestionably, death has some beneficial consequences for society. For one thing, it’s currently the most effective means of defeating dictators and tenure (which are often the same thing). I think the answer to that, though, is to come up with more effective means of dealing with dictators than the UN, and once it’s recognized that people are effectively living forever, or at least as long as they want to, tenure will have to face reform as well (in addition to an end to life-long appointments in general). Death also promotes innovation (as the old saying goes, science progresses, funeral by funeral).

But I’m not aware of any benefits that are worth sacrificing my life for. Risking, yes, but not sacrificing it. If death taking a holiday causes problems, I’d rather spend my life coming up with better solutions to those problems, rather than arbitrarily deciding that three-score and ten, or any other number, is the right one. After all, if one is going to argue that we should only live for a finite period of time, how would one come up with the right length? And how does this differ from mass executions, for the mere crime of living too long? It seems to me that the slope on which folks like Leon Kass and Eric Cohen tread is very slippery, with extremely ugly terrain at the bottom.

A teenage girl shot a picture of a flasher with her cellphone camera. Too bad she didn’t have one of these, instead.

From the Chairforce Engineer

John Scalzi (whose book I have yet to finish reviewing but, briefly, enjoyed greatly) has a dual book review of Glenn’s book, and Joel Garreau’s.

…and smellovision.

NASA has invented the tricorder.

Rand Simberg has already covered an Army of Davids here. Consider that some of the last vestiges of the old media that author Glenn Reynolds eulogizes. Simberg got a pre-print, I didn’t. There will soon be scant difference between the press and the public making the question of who to receive a pre-print something to be settled in shades of gray by Slash Dot ratings and auctions. That will make it easier for a media outsider like me to compete on a level playing field with more traditional media that gets their books early.

Reynolds’s book stands at the precipice of the future and treating different subjects seeks to penetrate the “fog of war” obscuring what will happen shortly. In places, Reynolds is foresighted and confident, especially in areas far along the path to individual control. In others, he seems flummoxed to explain what lies right around the corner despite having a well developed theory in another context.

In this extended review, I will take many of Reynolds’s claims and incomplete predictions and fill them out and complete them.

Continue reading Mass Exodus of Davids →

That’s what fusion has always been called. The old joke is that it’s the energy source of the future, and it always will be. Back in the seventies, we used to talk about the fusion constant–forty years–as the time it would take until fusion became commercially viable. That glorious day continues to recede off into the future. Now we learn that a leading researcher in the field threw in the towel shortly before he died.

I’m not as pessimistic, but I can see how someone could get discouraged after devoting one’s life to the goal and seeing so little progress. I think that we probably will still need better materials, but I wouldn’t give up hope yet. On the other hand, I wouldn’t bet on it, either–we need to be working on a number of fronts (including space power).

[Update a few minutes later]

I’d still like to hold out hope for fusion propulsion, even if it won’t be practical for electric power generation. How much harder/easier is that problem? It’s one that hasn’t gotten as much effort, but it’s not clear whether or not if you get one, you get the other.

This is cool.

Some of the Enigma messages were never broken. Now, you can contribute some CPU cycles to attempting to crack the last ones.

Actually, I think I know one of them. I’ll bet it’s “DON’T FORGET TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE.”

It may be in sight.